Top XI Overweight Footballers

With ‘Arry Redknapp’s (slightly flippant) claim that lazy chubster Adel Taraabt is currently “about three stone overweight” and not fit to play football for a living, Pies thought we’d take a look at our favourite players who refused to let the flab hold them back over the years.

Let’s jump straight in, shall we?

Tomas Brolin: Not that the shirts were particularly flattering back then, but the perennially ruddy-faced Brolin struggled to contain the puppy fat during the latter half of his career…

Jon Parkin: Like the kebab-and-Carling-fuelled Sky dish installer you play 5-a-side with who, by some bizarre kink of fate, also happens to possess the first touch of a saint…

Ferenc Puskas: Short, squat and stocky during his revered playing days, Puskas surrendered to the blubber in spectacular fashion post-retirement, as this appearance in a 1981 charity match duly exhibits…

Paul Gascoigne: He was nowt but gristle and acne during his early teenage career, but Gazza’s…err…“extra-curricular habits” soon added a strategic extra layer to his frame…

Dino Zoff, Gazza’s manager at Lazio: “He was a lovely boy, lovely, such a heart – but a troubled boy also.

“He ate ice cream for breakfast, he drank beer for lunch, when he was injured he blew up like a whale. But a player? Oh, beautiful, beautiful.”

Adriano: Like all self-respecting potential Brazilian world beaters, Adriano had his finger on the self-destruct button from day one…

Several Brazilian clubs have offered Adriano a way back into football over the past few years, but he seems to prefer getting liquored up in rough-as-arseholes Rio de Janeiro favelas.

Mido: Already hailing from a vastly wealthy family, it’s perhaps unsurprising that pudgy Mido took a very relaxed attitude to earning his £50,000 pocket money every week…

Neil Shipperley: Hardly the leanest, meanest son of a gun by the end of his career, but Ships definitely went up a few more shirt sizes after hanging up his boots – which he’s more than entitled to do, of course…

Jan Molby: Famously never left the centre-circle for the entirety of his 17-year professional career, because he was THAT DAMN GOOD…

Ronaldo: Struggled with wildly fluctuating weight issues for the majority of his later career but, quite frankly, Pies think he’d more than earned the right to look however he wanted to by that point…